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LATEM NROP! METAL PORN!

WeissWeiss Posts: 9,941 ✭✭✭✭✭
in Precious Metals

I've been buying and selling like a fiend over the last few months but the net result is pretty much a wash. More of a shift between stuff I acquired early that no longer really fits my stack in favor of larger and/or more standard units.

I've been fortunate to hit on a hoard of late 1960s to early 1970s Franklin Mint items.

Those of us who have been in this game for a long time have a knee-jerk reaction to most Franklin Mint items: Yuck! We've seen 5-gallon buckets of gaudy, overpackaged "1000 grain sterling silver!" Christmas or Mother's Day 1972 ingots and we know they are literally worth less than their silver value.

But hold on, now. Take a step back.

This massive lot included tons of bronze Nixon medals and "Great Moments in Tires" medals, etc., as you'd expect.

But there are needles in that haystack.

Most of the items they made have benefited from 40+ years of melting and melting and melting and melting. And melting. They really are getting harder to find. And the coin sets they made for foreign countries--especially the interesting, one-off, one-year sets, had tiny mintages to begin with. 40 or 50 years later, the numbers of surviving pieces has dwindled to almost nothing.

Most of the pieces from the pinnacle of the Franklin Mint were really, really well done. Their production values and attention to detail remains unmatched today. Recreating some of the pieces we scoff at and take for granted would cost 10 or 20 times their melt value if they could even be produced today.

Case in point.

One of the dozen items I found was something I'd never seen before.

Minted on a 4.5 troy ounce blank of sterling silver, mounted on a heavy, hand-finished walnut frame. A mintage of 2,600.
At the time the issue price was $375. And that was over 40 years ago. Regardless of how you feel about his art, there's no denying that this was one of Franklin Mint's most well made items. And for collectors who will never have an actual painting, this is a pretty nice consolation prize. They sell all over the board, from $100 to $1000 depending on the condition and originality.

We are like children who look at print and see a serpent in the last letter but one, and a sword in the last.
--Severian the Lame

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